About a third of the way into John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs — a book that sets Lennon and McCartney’s platonic love affair in the context of their lyrics, melodic lines and chord structures — the author, Ian Leslie, breaks off to tell us that the most important thing about the Beatles was their sound:
The deepest truth and greatest beauty of a Beatles song is found in Paul’s bass, John’s and George’s guitars, Ringo’s drumming; in the ensemble and the arrangements; in technological innovations and happy accidents; in the wash of sound achieved by [George] Martin and his engineers; and in the grain of the Beatles’ voices.
Although I’ve never seen the point made quite so baldly, I think I’ve always known this — and not just about the Beatles, but about music in general. As a listener, I find it’s the sound of familiar pieces of music that I carry with me, the weight and quality of the sound. As a composer, my pieces nearly always begin with an imagined sonority from which all else — pitches, rhythms, tempos — will emerge. Even if I’m putting words to music, I will have been attracted to the words in the first place by the sonic spark they ignite.
Recently, on The Music Show, Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols told me he’d never paid much attention to lyrics. I’m the same. In pop music, lyrics are often little more than carriers of melody, and even when it comes to the work of famous wordsmiths, such as Joni Mitchell or Elvis Costello, the words, for me, come after the music, and it is the sound of the music that comes first. Even with Dylan — or Leonard Cohen — one gains access to the words through the idiosyncratic nature of the voices that deliver them.
But then words are themselves made up of sounds; they have timbres, too. When a composer sets words to music, the colours in those words will form part of the whole. In the opera theatre, there is much to be said in favour of performing in the language of the audience. Spectators reading surtitles are likely to get to a punchline before or after the composer intended it, so the dramatic moment is spoilt. On the other hand, the colours of the Italian or German languages woven into the fabric of Verdi or Wagner’s scores will go missing in translation, and it seems for some reason even more of a loss when we don’t hear Tchaikovsky’s Russian or Janáček’s Czech.
Often I have found that I know the words to an old song — or, at least, can work them out in my mind — because I remember the sound of them. Rhymes help in this context, but sometimes it is simply the colours of the vowels in a familiar melodic line that calls up a lyric I had never consciously thought about. One of the reasons Ian Leslie’s book is so readable for a Beatles fan is that the songs are mostly very familiar. There’s no need to stop and play a track; you read a line of lyric on the page and you hear the song — the sound of the song — in your mind’s ear. And a big part of that sound is the Beatles’ voices, in all their defiant “Scouseness.” It remains a pleasure to hear pop music that is not sung in an American accent — “The geerl that’s driving me mad is going away”; “In Penny Lane the barber shaves anuhther cuhstomer” — and the sonic imprint of the vowels is as much a part of the Beatles’ sound as Ringo’s lazy hemiola pattern in “Ticket to Ride” or the piccolo trumpet in “Penny Lane.”
With songwriters who don’t perform their own work, the sound of the song changes from vocalist to vocalist, arrangement to arrangement. Yet there is something about a great lyric that contributes to the sound of a song, come what may. Among the American songwriters of the mid twentieth century were steady partnerships (George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein) and composers who wrote their own words (Irving Berlin and Cole Porter). But there were also more promiscuous collaborators, and with them it interesting to see how the nature — and yes, the sound — of songs changed when the lyricist changed.
Johnny Mercer is a good example, writing lyrics for a whole pantheon of composers including Hoagy Carmichael, Jimmy van Heusen, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, Duke Ellington and Henry Mancini (to list a few of the more famous names). In each composer, Mercer brought out something distinctly Mercerian, something sophisticated yet colloquial and conversational. “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road),” written with Arlen, is echt-Mercer.
The curious thing is that Mercer mostly supplied lyrics to tunes that had already been written. That’s how these composers worked. (The Rodgers and Hammerstein partnership, with words coming first, was the big exception.) So it’s hard to make the argument that Mercer’s words inspired a certain sort of music, a certain sound. We have to conclude that the sound was in the words and became every bit as much a part of the sound of “Skylark,” “Satin Doll” and “Moon River” — whoever sings those songs — as Carmichael, Ellington and Mancini’s music. •
